Quotes from The Bridge

Iain Banks ·  288 pages

Rating: (9.2K votes)


“I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.”
― Iain Banks, quote from The Bridge


“There is only darkness, starless and complete. The waves glitter like a million dull knives.”
― Iain Banks, quote from The Bridge


“It was as if some magnetic repulsion, which before had kept our two carriages from meeting and passing, had now been reversed, and so sucked me inexorably forward, drawing me towards something my heart made clear I feared - or should fear - utterly, in the way some people are fatally attracted towards an abyss while standing on its very edge.”
― Iain Banks, quote from The Bridge


“He would never forget the feeling of that first year, the sense of freedom just being on his own gave him. He had his own room for the first time, his own money to spend as he wanted, his own food to buy and places to go and decisions to make; it was glorious, sublime.”
― Iain Banks, quote from The Bridge


“I luv the ded, this old baster sez to me when I wiz tryin to get some innfurmashin out ov him. You fukin old pervirt I sez, gettin a bit fed up by this time enyway, an slit his throate; ah asks you whare the fukin Sleeping Byootie woz, no whit kind of humpin you lyke.”
― Iain Banks, quote from The Bridge



“jammed inside the bastard for three hours.’). And that bridge, the bridge . . . have to make a pilgrimage to”
― Iain Banks, quote from The Bridge


“Future became Present, Present became Past. A truth so banal, so obvious and accepted that he had somehow managed to ignore it before.”
― Iain Banks, quote from The Bridge


“You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would know she was part of you.”
― Iain Banks, quote from The Bridge


“This is not a long bridge, but it goes on for ever. I am not far from the bank, but I will never get there. I walk but I never move. Fast or slow, running, turning, doubling back, jumping, throwing myself or stopping; nothing makes any difference.”
― Iain Banks, quote from The Bridge


About the author

Iain Banks
Born place: in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland
Born date February 16, 1954
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Moor's Last Sigh


“You cloak your evil, your violence, in the mask of good. I am just evil.”
― Carrie Jones, quote from Captivate


“because I think I might want to kiss her. And touch her. A lot. Like, everywhere.”
― Colleen Hoover, quote from Maybe Not


“It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Purple Hibiscus


“I suppose that my inner soul - my dual personality - had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper - that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from The Good Soldier


Interesting books

After You
(203.3K)
After You
by Jojo Moyes
Light on Snow
(25.5K)
Light on Snow
by Anita Shreve
Audrey, Wait!
(13.9K)
Audrey, Wait!
by Robin Benway
100 Cupboards
(13.5K)
100 Cupboards
by N.D. Wilson
Existentialism Is a Humanism
(17.1K)
Existentialism Is a...
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Bed of Roses
(50.5K)
Bed of Roses
by Nora Roberts

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.